Grace Bauer hugged herself on the couch to stop her from shaking. She was sitting up in a tense position, her knees pressed tightly against each other… her shoulders rigid… her neck muscles straining.
‘I swear I thought I would be stronger than this,’ she said, her voice tired and raw. ‘And just look at me. I’m falling apart on our first ever session, but I no longer know what to do or how to act. The drugs simply aren’t working anymore.’
Josie Griffith sat by the window in the oxblood-colored chesterfield armchair that faced Grace. Her left leg was crossed over her right one, her posture relaxed, her hands resting on her thighs, together with her notepad. According to Grace’s consultation factsheet and to what she had told Josie so far during their session, Grace had been on prescribed antidepressant medications like Paxil and Brintellix for a little over ten months now, and though they’d helped, they still were no match for the overwhelming darkness that seemed to rule her thoughts on a daily basis. Despite being diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety eighteen months ago, this was Grace’s first ever psychotherapy session, and as far as she could remember, the first ever time in her adult life that someone had truly listened to her for anything over five minutes.
‘Every day is the same,’ Grace continued, as tears gathered along the lower rims of her eyes, threatening to spill over at any second. ‘I don’t feel like getting up in the mornings. I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to get into bed with my husband at night. I don’t want to talk to my friends. I don’t want to go out. I don’t want…’ She paused and looked down at her arms folded around her body, the tears finally overpowering her will not to cry again. ‘I don’t want this life anymore.’
Josie glanced out the window of her second floor office in Downtown LA, at the tall office tower directly across the road from her. For a second, she wondered how many people in those offices really wanted to be there. How many of them were doing a job that they really wanted to do. Her gaze moved to the street and to the line of cars waiting for the traffic light to go green on the intersection down below. She wondered how many of those sitting inside their cars were going somewhere where they really wanted to go. How many of them would be returning to a home, or even to a relationship, that they really wanted to be in. The ugly truth, Josie knew, was that few people on this planet had the luxury of doing a job that they really wanted to do. Few lived a life they really wanted to live, even those who were fabulously rich.
Sitting there, listening to Grace, made Josie think back to how lucky she was to have someone like Oliver in her life… how lucky she was to be so in love with him and he so in love with her.
‘I don’t want this life anymore.’ To a psychotherapist, a statement like that was the mother of all red flags.
‘Have you thought about hurting yourself, Grace?’ Josie asked calmly, looking over at her.
Grace looked away and nervously ran her tongue across the edge of her teeth. She used the tips of her fingers to gently wipe away her tears. She chose not to reply.
‘Have you thought about hurting someone else?’ Josie tried a different approach, still keeping her voice calm and her posture steady and in control.
Grace coughed to clear her throat, but her mouth felt like sandpaper, and her words caught in the roughness of it. ‘I just want this horrible feeling inside to go away. I don’t want to feel like this anymore. That’s all I want.’
To Josie, that sounded like an evasive answer. People tended to show telltale signs – they’d look away, coughed, scratched some part of their body that didn’t need scratching, blushed, licked their lips, something – when a truth that they didn’t want anyone else to know about was mentioned. Josie didn’t want to call Grace out for being evasive, not on their first session, but she needed to pursue this subject because it was truly worrying her.
‘Tell me about this feeling inside, Grace. What is it like? Why is it horrible?’
Grace once again looked back at her psychotherapist, but the look in her eyes seemed hollow… soulless even, as if behind those beautiful dark eyes there was nothing left but pain.
‘The feeling of nothing inside,’ she replied in a lifeless tone. ‘This terrible emptiness everywhere. The worthlessness that I feel every day.’
Josie watched tears well up in Grace’s eyes yet again.
Grace was in her mid to late forties and still very attractive, with a perfect slope to her nose and cheekbones, wavy mahogany hair, and round, dark-as-night eyes. Physically, she also looked to be in great shape.
Throughout their session, Grace had told Josie a lot about herself and her life. She had told her that at the age of twenty-two, she had married her husband, Dayton Bauer, twelve years her senior and already tremendously wealthy, having made all of his fortune on the stock market. At first, Grace had convinced herself that she was as happy as she could possibly be, but now, over twenty years later, with her beauty and physical presence just beginning to fade, or so she believed, she had finally decided to face the fact that she had never been in love with the man she’d married, nor was she in love with her fake lifestyle. She had allowed beauty and wealth and materialistic things to drag her away from her true self, and now she had no idea of how to get back to the person she once was, or whether there would be anything left for her to get back to.
‘Doesn’t your job give you some sort of fulfillment?’ Josie asked. ‘A small but very important bridge over some of this void you feel inside? Don’t you enjoy what you do?’
Grace had already told Josie that she ran her own interior decorating business. She explained that quite a few years back, she had managed to secure a few contracts to redesign the houses of several Hollywood stars. That had been the push she needed because once she got a few prestigious names onto her roster of clients, more business followed almost automatically, and it had never stopped.
Grace chuckled dismissively, as she finally unhugged herself and rested her hands on her lap. ‘I’ll let you in on a little secret, darling. Are you ready?’ She readjusted herself on the couch. ‘I don’t know the first thing about interior design. My husband pushed me into it, probably because he was sick of me being at home all day with nothing to do. He said I had a good eye to make a room look “neat”.’ Grace paused and nodded at Josie, sarcastically. ‘Yes, “neat” really was the word he used. I’m a fraud. I’m no interior decorator. What I can do is match colors and put furniture items together in a way that it won’t look like someone has puked all over the room.’
Josie let a smile part her lips.
‘I’m serious,’ Grace reinforced her argument. ‘You’d really be surprised if you could see inside some of these houses. Matching colors and furniture together seems like something that very few people in this city can do, especially the rich and famous. They just go out and buy, buy, buy. Then they throw everything together in a room and think that just because they spent a fortune on the crap they bought, everything will look good, regardless.’ She shook her head disapprovingly. ‘The first few celebrities I managed to get into my portfolio came to me because of my husband and his contacts, not because I was good at what I did.’ She shrugged. ‘And in a city as fake and as shallow as LA, that’s all you need to get started. The rest will follow like sheep. You know how it goes, right?’ Grace put on an overly nasal voice. ‘Oh, she’s decorated so-and-so’s house. She must be awesome. Let’s hire her, honey.’
Another smile from Josie.
For a heartbeat, Grace seemed to curl in on herself, her chin dipped, almost bowing forward beneath some invisible weight. Guilt? Shame? Something between the two?
‘Truth is,’ she said, her tone apologetic, ‘I’m not awesome at all. Far from it. I’m just not stupid or blind when it comes to arranging colors, furniture and items in a room, that’s all.’
Josie couldn’t help but wonder what Grace thought of how she had decorated her office. For a split second, she glanced left then right. Was the office too dark? Too bright? Too colorful?
As her gaze settled upon her office window again, she absentmindedly glanced down at the street two stories below.
That was when Josie saw him.
On the sidewalk, leaning back against the building across the road, a tall and well-built man was just standing there. His black jacket was zipped up all the way to his neck, with a hoodie pulled tightly over his head and his hands casually tucked into his pockets. In truth, there was nothing really different about the man, except for the fact that he seemed to be looking straight up at Josie’s office window. For a moment, their eyes met, but the man quickly blinked and looked away.
Josie blinked as well, and just like that, the man was gone. She searched left then right, but he had blended into the crowd like a shadow. She blinked again and brought her attention back to Grace, who had just placed her right hand over her left wrist. Her fingers brushed the face of the expensive-looking watch she was wearing.
‘These things,’ Grace said, touching the small butterfly pendant hanging from the chain around her neck. ‘Do you know what they are?’
Josie thought about replying ‘terribly expensive by the looks of them’, but she held her tongue, instead answered in her favorite manner – with a question.
‘What are they to you?’
Grace looked away again, when she looked back at Josie, her eyes had a hint of anger in them. She chuckled.
‘They are reminders of the mistake I made… of the prison that I voluntarily walked into all those years ago. I was young and very, very poor. The kind of poor that led me to foolishly believe that materialistic things like these would, somehow, make me happy.’ She indicated her jewelry again. ‘Well they don’t. They never have. I hate them, and I truly hate myself for being so naïve and stupid… so gullible.’
Grace’s words made Josie wonder just how dark and harmful her thoughts really were. In the space of just a few minutes she had avoided answering if she had ever fantasized about hurting herself or others, she had compared her life to a prison sentence, and she had used the word ‘hate’ twice – one of those, in relation to herself. Josie wondered how much those thoughts could be pushing her toward something truly destructive. The impression that Josie was getting, not only from Grace’s words, but from her demeanor, her facial expressions, her tone of voice, and her gestures, was that Grace seemed to really be struggling against an ever-growing impulse to hurt herself – the proverbial ‘ticking time-bomb’. Josie wonder if that was why Grace had finally decided to seek the help of a psychotherapist – because she was at the brink of something very, very bad. In the face of all that, Josie had to try again.
‘Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by everything around you?’ she asked. ‘By the life you lead?’
‘Ha!’ Grace laughed. ‘Sometimes? Try “all the time”. I told you – I hate this life. I don’t want it anymore.’
And there it was again.
Josie wrote something down on her notepad.
‘And what do you think about during those times?’ she asked. ‘Do you feel like you need to punish yourself in some way? Punish others?’
Grace looked down at her hands, which she had clasped together, before regarding Josie with a deep probing gaze.
Josie waited but all Grace did was check her watch.
‘Can we continue this next week, if you have a free slot?’ she asked, reaching for her handbag. ‘I really have to go now.’
Grace was evading having to answer the question again.
Josie kept her attention on her patient. She was fully aware of the time.
‘We still have fifteen minutes to go in this session, Grace.’
‘Do we?’ Grace stood up.
Josie didn’t. She wanted to state the fact that it was Grace who was walking away. It was Grace who had declined to go deeper into what was really going on inside her head.
‘We do,’ Josie reconfirmed, but it didn’t deter her patient.
‘Unfortunately I really have to go,’ Grace said again, this time with a little more determination. She took three steps toward the door before pausing and facing Josie one last time.
‘I can guarantee you,’ she said, holding Josie’s gaze, her voice measured… her tone tender. ‘I’m in no way a danger or a threat to myself, or anyone else. I have never had any sort of harmful or destructive thoughts involving me or others, and that includes animals.’
Boom.
It was as if a nuclear bomb had just gone off inside Josie’s office.
Josie felt the sound of those words crawling along her nerve endings. She blinked twice, wondering if she had heard right, because what Grace Bauer had just done right there was what was known in psychiatry as a ‘contract for safety’ – the words a potentially dangerous patient had to voluntarily speak in order to avoid being compulsorily taken into hospital and committed to a secure psychiatric ward.
Suddenly, Josie had the impression that Grace Bauer knew a lot more about psychiatry and psychoanalysis than she had let on. She knew that the session was being recorded and that her ‘contract for safety’ was now on tape. Unless Grace voluntarily nulled that contract by explicitly verbally contradicting what she had just said, no matter how dangerous to herself or others she might appear to be in subsequent sessions, Josie could not have her committed. Not after a ‘contract for safety’.
‘Thank you so much for your time,’ Grace said with a lingering smile. ‘Hopefully I’ll see you next week. I’ll call to book another appointment.’
Several seconds after Grace Bauer had left her office, and still trying to process what had just happened, Josie, in one of those instinctive movements, turned and once again looked out her window. She wasn’t really sure what she was expecting to see, or what that would accomplish. She just wanted to have one last look at Grace before she disappeared, maybe into a chauffeur-driven car, or just walking off into the crowd down below – but Josie never spotted Grace. She did, however, spot the man she had seen earlier. He was back in the same spot he had been before. Just standing there… hands tucked into his pockets. Josie stood up to try to get a better line of sight, but as she did, just like that, the man once again blended himself back into the crowd, disappearing like thin smoke in the air.