章 2536: 119
Chapter 119: Denouement E-2
Denouement E.2
Five years had changed Emma Barnes.
She wasn't sure it was for the better, some days. Most days, though, she thought it was. On her best days, she felt like she was always improving.
And on her worst days, she cursed everyone and anyone she could think of, from her therapist for putting her through the mental wringer to her family for letting her be locked up in here to her father for not making her get therapy sooner to Sophia for saving her life and Taylor for refusing to just fucking die in the Locker.
There had been a lot of days like that, in the beginning. Days where she'd just wanted to curl up in a ball and die, days where she wished she'd never been born, days where she hated Sophia for getting killed and leaving her to fall apart, and then days where she couldn't stop crying for the best friend she'd nearly killed herself.
How ironic that the last thing she'd ever said to Taylor was a cruel barb at her for spending an entire week crying after her mother's death.
Sometimes, Emma wondered if it was all worth it and wished she could go back to how things used to be, before she had to look inside of herself and try to piece together what was healthy and cut away what was sick, the "maladaptive" parts that Doctor Maguire had explained as bad habits people fell back on when they didn't have good coping mechanisms. Sometimes, Emma thought she would rather die than become the mess she'd been back then, again.
Sometimes, Emma caught herself slipping.
That was okay, Doctor Maguire had told her patiently, in that warm, kind way of his. Therapy was a journey, a long road with plenty of twists and turns and detours, and not all of those led you where you wanted to go. Some of them took you backwards. Some of them catapulted you ahead. The important part was to keep going.
So Emma took up painting.
It seemed like a win-win to her. Doctor Maguire had somehow set things up so that she could earn her GED, so she needed the credit on her transcripts, and he'd been telling her for three years that the secret weapon to conquering your demons wasn't to face them head on, but to exorcise them, to force them into the light of day and see them for what they really were.
She didn't know if she was any good — some of the paintings she knew people celebrated as the best ever just seemed like random blotches to her, so she for all she knew, she could be some master class artist or a complete hack — and it wasn't really about that, anyway. She just knew that it helped her. Whenever she started in on one of her spirals, these days, she would pick up a canvas and pour it all out through her brush.
And when she was done, whatever had ended up on her canvas, whether it was something comprehensible and solid or utter nonsense that could only generously be called "impressionist," she felt empty. A good kind of empty. Tired and hollowed out, but healing. Like cleaning out an old wound or setting a broken bone.
When she asked Doctor Maguire if that was how it was supposed to be, he'd just given her a small, kind smile and said that no two journeys were ever the same. Which was kinda frustrating and sounded a little like bullshit, but Emma understood what he was trying to tell her: no two people ever experienced the same thing in therapy or found the same ways of dealing with things, no matter how similar they were.
It didn't stop her from wondering what the painting in his office had helped him deal with, although she'd never managed to muster the bravery to ask.
There were some lines you weren't meant to cross, and Emma had already managed to scare away something like half a dozen different therapists before Doctor Maguire came along, so if she just had to spend the rest of her life wondering, then that was what she was going to do. No matter how much she wanted to know.
Maybe it has something to do with his wife?
But Emma could not say she didn't know how easily you could be left raw and aching when someone picked at your emotional wounds. She'd spent three years having to rip into hers so that she could get to the source and finally come to terms with everything that had happened to her and five years being chased by them. She wouldn't go ripping into someone else's just to satisfy her own curiosity.
Five years. It was incredible to think so much time had passed, and at the same time, it felt like it had been an eternity. The Emma of five years ago wouldn't recognize her now, and she almost couldn't believe exactly what she'd been like five years ago.
The door to the room buzzed. "Emma?" Doctor Maguire's voice came over the intercom. "Are you ready?"
The pitfalls of living in a minimum security psychiatric hospital. You didn't have much privacy, you couldn't really leave your room without permission, and there was a lot of rigidity and structure to how you interacted with the staff.
Vainly, Emma ran a hand over her hair and tried to smooth down any wrinkles in her smock, even though it was kind of pointless and wouldn't make her look any less like a mental patient. Butterflies fluttered in her belly, and her throat felt suddenly very dry.
"I'm ready!" she called out, knowing the microphone would pick it up.
The buzzer sounded again, harsh and discordant, and the locks disengaged with a click. Then door to the room slid open, and in walked a ghost.
Except no, at second glance, Emma realized that it wasn't Annette Hebert — Auntie Anne, as she had called her secondary mother figure up until the day of her death — who walked through her door, but a grown up Taylor. It was easy to mistake them, from afar, but a closer look told the tale in the shape of the mouth, the set of the jaw, the color of the eyes, all of which she had inherited more from her father.
The only reason Emma had mistaken them was because the last image she had had of Taylor had been of a slouching teenage girl in baggy clothes and glasses, and in spite of her height, the combination had made her look shorter and smaller, like she had never actually grown any older than the twelve-year-old who had lost her mother. Fifteen year old Taylor had looked perpetually wilted, like she was trying to disappear into the wall or waiting for the ground to open up and swallow her whole.
The woman who walked in was confident and sure. Her spine was straight and her face was stolid, fierce instead of deliberately blank, and she wore a fitted blouse and pantsuit that made her seem closer to thirty than the meager twenty-one she actually was. A squat, short-brimmed black trilby hat sat atop her head, decorated with a wavy band of gold around the bottom, and her hair was pulled back into a loose tail at the base of her neck.
Emma felt as though she'd walked into some sort of alternate universe. There was a certain sense of unreality to the whole situation, that she was the one trying to put herself back together after five, long years of mandated therapy and the girl she'd been so afraid of becoming once upon a time looked not only put together, but successful and mature.
Somehow, fifteen year old Emma, who had been looking forward to a series of modeling contracts and a life of success and wealth, had become a twenty year old mental patient at a minimum security psychiatric clinic, and fifteen year old Taylor, who had always looked one bad day from dropping out of school, had five years later turned into someone who looked like she had just walked off the cover of Forbes.
Emma was so absorbed in Taylor's stunning transformation that she almost didn't notice the shorter, bearded Doctor Maguire step in behind her and close the door. From behind Taylor's back, he gave Emma an encouraging smile and picked his glasses off of his face, folding them up and tucking them into his shirt pocket next to a pen.
"Miss Hebert," Doctor Maguire said in his rumbling baritone as he stepped around Taylor, "I want to thank you for agreeing to meet with Emma, today."
Taylor glanced at him, but her expression gave nothing away, and her attention immediately refocused on Emma, again. "It was no problem, Doctor Maguire."
Emma felt like she was being stabbed by those eyes, so sharp and fierce. They were like knives to her soul, punching through her every defense and going right through her, exposing all her ghastly innards for everyone to see.
Maybe… Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea, after all.
"If you would, please, take a seat?"
Doctor Maguire gestured to one of the three chairs arrayed around the table in the center of the room. Taylor paused a moment, and then chose the one farthest from Emma, the one that put them directly across from each other. She made a deliberate sweep of the room with her gaze, one eyebrow ticking upwards.
"No couch?" she asked, dry as Emma's mouth.
"Oh, well," Doctor Maguire joked, "the last thing I want to do as a therapist is put my clients to sleep!"
Taylor's lips pulled into a tight smile, the only trace of humor in her face, and then smoothed back out as she positioned herself, one leg crossed over the other and hands folded in her lap. Again, she gave the impression of a professional, a businesswoman, prim and proper.
"As has already been explained to you, Emma is shortly due for an evaluation," Doctor Maguire said patiently. "At that time, if I have determined that she has sufficiently adjusted and is ready to return to a normal life, she will be discharged from this facility and return home to her family. Any further sessions, of course, will be out patient, to be continued at Emma's discretion. These were the terms set for her when she was put into our custody."
Emma swallowed thickly.
"Ordinarily," Doctor Maguire continued, "this sort of joint therapy session would take place then. As you are not my patient, Miss Hebert, and have no obligation of any sort to Emma, I have no authority to mandate your presence here today, nor do any of the other staff or the judge who originally handled Emma's sentencing. Your coming at all is strictly voluntary."
"I'm aware," Taylor said crisply.
"That also means I don't have access to any of your own medical records, psychiatric or otherwise," said Doctor Maguire. "My knowledge of your relationship with my client is entirely based upon everything she herself has told me." Taylor's mouth drew into a tight line. "I'll try to avoid stumbling into any particularly sensitive issues today, but if you're uncomfortable at any moment, there is nothing keeping you here."
He paused, but Taylor didn't say anything, so he went on. "Having said that, I would like to ask that you stay. As hard as it might be to hear some of the things Emma says and as understandably difficult as it is to look someone in the face who has done to you what Emma has done, this will be hard on Emma, too. Above all else, I want you to keep in mind that I'm not asking you to forgive her, I'm just asking you to keep an open mind and listen."
"So that she can exorcise her demons, as it were?" Taylor smiled, but it was a thing without warmth or humor. "I suppose I know a thing or two about that."
There was a story there. Nervously, Emma wondered if it was one about her.
"Whatever happens today, I want you to remember that this isn't about tearing anyone down," Doctor Maguire said. "In fact, just the opposite. We're going to be cementing Emma's strong foundation." He turned at last in Emma's direction. "Emma, would you like to begin?"
Emma's mouth opened…and nothing came out. She closed it, then opened it again, trying to find the words that she'd been planning and all of the things she'd wanted to say for the last three years, but it was like they'd all been stolen from her. Like the carpet had been pulled out from under her feet. They wouldn't come, and when she searched for them, wracked her brain to try and remember them, her mind was utterly blank.
Taylor watched her silently, and as the seconds stretched out uncomfortably, her eyebrows slowly began to rise.
Oh god. Emma looked down and away, unable to meet her erstwhile best friend's gaze, and she felt her cheeks flush as blood rushed to her face.
"I…" she began in a small voice. At length, she admitted, "I don't know where to start."
"An apology might be a good place," Taylor said dryly.
The heat in Emma's face grew hotter.
"Would it even help?" she asked miserably. "After everything?"
Taylor paused, seemed to consider the question seriously for a second, and then said, "No, I guess it wouldn't."
Emma's fingers curled into the fabric of her scrubs, clutching tightly to the material as she hunched over. Her eyes stayed locked on Taylor's legs, and for an irrational moment, she felt insanely jealous of Taylor's shiny shoes, and at the same time, fond and wistful, because of course Taylor wouldn't wear high heels, not when she was already self-conscious about how tall she was.
In a sea of unfamiliarity, that somehow felt solid. Grounding.
"And why is that?" Doctor Maguire asked gently from his place between them.
Taylor turned, but Emma didn't have it in her to look up, so she could only imagine the utterly bewildered look she must have been shooting him.
"Humor me," he added.
"I thought this was about her, not me," said Taylor.
"Emma might be my patient, but if hers are the only feelings we talk about, we won't get very far at all. Emma asked for you to come and you came, and that means something, whatever that something is. So please, Taylor. Why wouldn't an apology help things?"
Taylor was silent for a long moment. Emma couldn't muster the courage to look into her face, and every stretched second felt like an eternity. Taylor's gaze was a heavy weight that hung about her neck, and she felt as though she were being weighed and measured before some higher power, just waiting to be condemned for all of the sins she'd committed, from the little white lies and the theft of cookies from the cookie jar all the way up to the big things, the ones that really mattered.
At last, in a low, quiet voice, she said, "You tortured me."
Emma flinched as though she'd been struck.
"For the better part of two years, you and your friends did everything that was within your power to make every possible second of my life you could into a living hell," Taylor went on. "You destroyed my grades, you destroyed my property, you destroyed everything good about my life that you could, and you nearly destroyed me."
"I…" Emma's voice cracked and failed, but somehow, she managed to get out, in something barely above a whisper, "I'm sorry. I…"
She wanted to offer an explanation. She wanted to spill it all out and reveal the whole sordid tale from start to finish, so that maybe Taylor could understand exactly how fucked up she'd been and what the Alley had done to her, but it seemed just so inadequate. A bandaid for a bullet wound.
What is it you want, she could imagine Doctor Maguire asking. Forgiveness? Or closure?
I don't deserve forgiveness, she'd told him back then. God, had it already been two years since then?
Then you don't have anything to lose by asking for it.
But she couldn't force the words out, because even if she didn't deserve forgiveness and even if she knew she didn't deserve it, that didn't mean that Emma didn't want it.
Things could never go back to the way they were. Not after everything she'd done. But oh, how desperately Emma wished.
"You didn't think that would make it all better, did you?" Taylor asked softly. "We're not little girls anymore, Emma. This isn't the same as you stepping on my toes or spilling soda on my shirt."
Emma swallowed. "I… I know."
"I don't think you really do," Taylor rebuked, but it was cool and without heat. "Or maybe I'm not giving you enough credit. Maybe you knew exactly what you were doing to me."
"I…" Emma closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, and tried to banish the image of fifteen-year-old Taylor's hurt face from behind them. It didn't work. "I did."
"And Sophia?"
"She… She wouldn't have cared, if you'd just —"
Emma cut herself off, because that was a lie. Or, well, not a lie, but a half-truth. Sophia might not have cared about inducting Taylor into their little circle if Taylor had stood up for herself, back in the early days, but Emma herself wouldn't have let it happen. Not when she was trying so hard to distance herself from Taylor, from the broken girl who had spent a week crying herself to sleep.
"I was the one who encouraged Sophia to go after you," she admitted. "It's… She wouldn't have focused on you if it wasn't for me."
"That doesn't absolve her of anything," Taylor said. "If it wasn't me, it would've been someone else."
"You're right."
It was one of the things Emma had to come to terms with, these last few years, one of the issues she'd had to work through. As much as she'd clung to Sophia and reinvented so much of herself around their friendship, Sophia had never been good for her. She'd saved Emma's life, sure, but everything else she'd done had been a toxic influence, a poison that had slowly destroyed Emma, too.
"Sophia wasn't a good person," Emma admitted. "She was…twisted up. And she made me twisted up, too."
"So it was all Sophia's fault?" Taylor asked skeptically and with scorn.
"Yes," was Emma's immediate answer, and then a second later, "no. I…"
She licked her lips, swallowed, and tried to arrange her thoughts in order.
"She found me when I was in a bad spot," she decided on, "and I… I latched onto her, onto the…the idea of her. I convinced myself that…that she was strong and I needed to be more like her, and less…less like you."
Taylor shifted. When Emma risked a glance, she was looking back at her with a peculiar expression, like she wasn't quite sure what to make of that. "Less like me?"
"You broke," Emma said quietly, "after Auntie Anne…after your mom died. You and Uncle Danny both. You fell apart and you couldn't… I didn't want to be like that. I didn't want to feel like that."
"Human?"
"Broken," Emma corrected. "Like a glass that shattered and there was no way to fix it. I didn't want to be that…that helpless. "
That powerless, that far out of control of herself and her life. She'd been lying to herself: the Alley had broken her, but Sophia had let her feel like she could glue the pieces back together if only she pretended she'd never broken in the first place. Fake it til you make it. She'd just had to cut out anything that endangered that, any parts that were too critical to the old Emma who hadn't survived the Alley.
Taylor had just been one of those parts.
"What happened that summer, Emma?"
A tremor shot through Emma's body. As though she could see through everything Emma had built up around it, Taylor asked the one question Emma had been dreading since she walked through the door.
"I…"
She hesitated. Her tongue suddenly felt leaden and stiff in her mouth.
"Emma," Doctor Maguire cut in. He'd been so quiet that Emma had forgotten he was even there. "I know this is difficult for you. If you can, I think you should share this with Taylor. But don't force yourself. Mental wellness isn't a race —"
"It's a marathon," she finished for him, and in spite of herself, she felt her lips pull into a smile.
She took a deep breath, then another, and another, slowly and deliberately, and it helped to ground her, to keep her metaphorical feet planted. It was like each breath was a root, sturdy and strong, that was anchoring her in place, bracing her against the storm and the whirlwind that was her emotions. She would not be moved by them. She was in control.
Thank you, she didn't say out loud. It was only because of him that she'd even gotten as far as she did.
"You were away at camp," she began, and she was proud of the fact that her voice didn't waver in the slightest. "I was out with Dad, I don't remember why, but whatever the reason, we had to go through ABB territory…"
Somehow, Emma managed to tell the entire story without stopping or hesitating or drifting off into too many tangents. Maybe it was even because she'd had to relive it so many times already, first to tell the thing to Doctor Maguire and then in her nightmares as she slowly worked through everything that came parcelled with it, but she didn't really feel anything as she spoke, either. It was like she was giving a book report at school — lifetime ago as that was — or even like it was something that had happened to someone else.
The only thing she really felt was relief, like it was this huge weight that was being lifted off of her chest.
"…found me afterwards," she finished. "She pulled me out of it, managed to make me feel like I wasn't a loser or pathetic. And I just… I latched onto that, because the Alley…"
This time, when she trailed off, it was because she didn't really know how to describe it, not because she'd had the words and they failed her. How did you explain to someone what it was like to face the reality of exactly how fragile your life was and exactly how indifferent the universe and everyone in it was about your suffering? How did you describe the raw feeling that came with having the veneer of your normal, perfectly happy life ripped away? The knowledge that if push came to shove, you would die just as easily as the ant you'd smushed beneath your shoe?
Taylor's mouth curled on the one side, and Emma got the feeling that yeah, Taylor knew exactly what that was like. "Yeah."
"The Emma who went into that alley didn't make it," Emma said quietly. "If I wanted to survive, I had to get rid of everything that was left of her, and that meant you, too." She glanced over at Doctor Maguire, who hadn't said anything. "Or that's the way I felt, at least."
"And that involved tearing me apart?" Taylor asked sharply.
Emma looked away.
"No. I just… You were getting better. Bouncing back. But you broke before, so I had to prove I was stronger than that."
Stronger than you, she didn't say, although she thought Taylor probably heard it anyway.
Taylor took a deep breath in through her nose.
"Ten years of friendship," she began, "and almost two years of bullying and torment, and that's it?"
Emma flinched.
"Miss Hebert," Doctor Maguire tried.
"No, don't take that the wrong way," Taylor cut across him. "I was expecting… I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe that's the problem. You and I were best friends for almost ten years, Emma, and I guess I built up the idea in my head that the reason why you ditched me to hang around with a bitch like Sophia had to be something huge. Monumental. And I guess, in a way, it was, don't get me wrong about that."
The leather of her chair squeaked under the strength of her grip.
"But ten years of friendship got tossed in the trash because your rich lawyer father decided not to get you therapy after a near death experience that would traumatize most adults, too?"
An anemic urge to defend her dad welled up in Emma's chest, but it sputtered and died before it could gain traction. With the benefit of hindsight and Doctor Maguire's help, a part of her did kind of blame him for not getting her help sooner, when it could really have turned her life around, instead of letting everything fall apart, first.
"For what it's worth, Miss Hebert," Doctor Maguire said, "there's still a great deal of stigma around mental illness. Many, many people who could benefit greatly from a little bit of help go without, and many people who need it desperately never get it."
Taylor grimaced and sighed, relaxing back into her chair. She mumbled something about someone named "Lisa," and Emma had a brief flash of inexplicable jealousy for the girl she could only imagine had taken her place in Taylor's life.
"Is this the part where we cry and hug it out and everything is magically better?"
"Well, I won't stop you if the two of you decide you want to," Doctor Maguire said with a small grin, "but I can't decide for either of you what you want once you've resolved everything. Frankly, trying to resolve it all in a single session isn't a good idea anyway. In fact…"
He glanced at his watch.
"We are about out of time, for today."
Taylor's eyes went wide, and she looked down at her own watch. Emma's eyes found the clock hanging above the door, and she was shocked to discover that it had already been an hour since they'd first sat down to talk.
Had they really been talking for that long? It hadn't really felt that long; in fact, it had felt more like fifteen minutes, at a stretch.
Doctor Maguire stood, and almost as though that had been a signal, Taylor jumped up from her seat, as well. He held out his hand and she took it, shaking politely.
"Miss Hebert," he said, "I'd like to thank you for agreeing to come and see Emma today."
Taylor glanced back her way and gave the doctor a kind of sardonic half-smile. "I owed it to someone to at least give it a try."
"Would you be willing to have future joint sessions?"
For a moment, Taylor didn't answer. She looked over in Emma's direction, again, and seemed to make up her mind about something.
"I guess I will."
Emma swallowed and let her head drop as unshed tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. She didn't know why. What was there to cry about? It wasn't like she was sad and there wasn't some great and incredible sacrifice being made on her behalf. It was just Taylor agreeing to come and see her again.
"You have my contact information?"
"As long as it doesn't change."
"I'd like you to give me a week's notice next time, if you could. I might need to take time off to make it here."
They exchanged pleasantries and chatted for a few minutes about the next joint session, and it all sort of filtered through Emma's head as background noise. She didn't really have anything to say about it, and even if she did, she didn't really know what to say. An apology seemed inadequate before, when she was trying to explain how fucked up she'd been five years ago. A thank you seemed weirdly placed here and too simple for the situation now.
Once everything was decided upon, Taylor and Doctor Maguire exchanged farewells, and Taylor's expensive shoes clacked as she walked away. Emma didn't know if she was supposed to be upset or not that she hadn't merited a goodbye, herself, but after everything, it probably was being too greedy to expect things had returned that close to normal.
"Emma?"
Emma looked up and Taylor looked back at her, halfway to the door, expression solemn.
"I'm glad you told me."
Emma offered a wan smile in reply. "Seven years too late."
Taylor gave her a tight smile back. "Yeah, I guess it was."
And then she walked back out of Emma's life.
She and Taylor wouldn't ever be friends again. Not the way they once had been, at least. Too many bridges had been burned, too much trust had been broken.
But even if they never saw each other again and never spoke one word to each other after today, Emma felt like she'd finally let go of the burden that had been holding her back. She was ready to move on, to take her first steps into her new lease on life.
She liked to think that the twelve-year-old girl she'd left behind would be happy for her, even if her twenty-one-year-old self hated Emma's guts.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
NOTES
I am not a licensed therapist, folks. Don't take any part of this as psychiatric advice.
I hope everyone stuck around and didn't immediately click off of this chapter the instant they saw who the POV was.
Yes, Emma got a (very condensed) redemption arc. Somehow, when the suggestion was floated in the thread, I don't think this is what they had in mind. But the theme of the epilogue is, fittingly, "moving forward," and there was still someone who would be left behind if she wasn't at least mentioned.
Don't miss the reference made with the therapist.
One more chapter left. Hard to believe Essence is almost over. It felt incredibly weird when I penned the final words.
Special thanks to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best.
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