The Purgatorium (8 page)

The sun was a large golden orb quickly descending to their right, casting colors across the sea. Although the air was still muggy, the moving boat generated a pleasant breeze that kept them all from suffocating.

The group was disappointed not to see whales, but the sea lions kept them well entertained, until suddenly Bridget was pulling her dress over her head and leaping from the boat in her underwear.

“Is she allowed to do that?” Daphne asked Gregory.

“I don’t see why not.”

Cam’s full attention returned to Bridget, and he laughed with joy, slapping his hand against his thigh. “I can’t believe she did it!” he said. “Look at her!”

The boat idled in place so as not to leave the swimmer behind. Before Daphne thought twice about it, she pulled her dress over her head and followed Bridget in.

I’m such a child, she thought, tugging her bra strap back to her shoulder, ashamed of herself, but she had to admit the water felt great, and, surprisingly, the sea lions hadn’t left their rock. They looked at her with curiosity. She swam closer to them, leaving Bridget in her wake.

The others were shouting at her, but she couldn’t tell what they were saying. She suspected they were cheering her on, and she was happy she had stolen the show, if even for a moment, from Bridget.  She was determined to get closer to the sea lions.

When she looked back at the boat, she saw Bridget being helped back in, and the rest of the group shouting toward her. They were pointing, probably at the sea lions. Daphne gave them a thumbs up as the boat moved toward her. She looked again at the sea lions when something hit her on the head. It was a life buoy. She turned to the boat to see the entire group leaning over the rail screaming at her, pointing. At the sea lions?

Then Daphne saw the dorsal fins of the sharks about ten feet away. There were three of them. Her mouth fell open, and she stopped kicking. She imagined the jaws chomping her body in half, or worse, taking her limbs one by one with her mind still conscious. What a way to go. So many times she had fantasized about her death, but being pulled apart by sharks hadn’t crossed her mind. Now, faced with that possibility, she felt the air leave her body, a vice grip her throat, and the scream, lodged there, stifled. She was going to die. But first, she was going to have to endure extreme torture.

She held on to the buoy and realized Cam and Gregory were pulling her in with all their strength as the captain sped away from the sharks with the boat. She was spinning through the water, in a blind and panicky delirium, unable to see or hear or think.

It wasn’t until she was safely on the deck of the pier, down on her knees sucking in air and trembling, that it occurred to her the sharks might not have been real. They could have been divers with fins strapped to their backs, actors in yet another terrifying game.

She was given a towel and a great deal of sympathy and helped by Gregory and Cam from the pier to the jeep. The slight smile on Cam’s face as he left her to join Bridget reinforced her suspicion that it had been a game, and Bridget had been one of the actors, in on it from the beginning. Daphne wondered how it all would have played out if she hadn’t gone in the water. Perhaps someone would have pushed her in, unless the sharks were meant for Bridget. Daphne suspected she had reacted predictably to Cam and Bridget’s behavior. Was she really so easy to manipulate?

After a sleepless night alone—Cam had answered none of her calls and had seemed to vanish from the island—Daphne received a phone call from the girl at the courtesy desk asking her to come in a half hour to Dr. Gray’s office on the second floor of the main building, room 200. Daphne hadn’t planned on going to breakfast—there were still plenty of fruit and things in her room—but now she quickly showered and dressed, wondering what this was all about. She supposed she could refuse to go, but she had to admit she was curious to know why the doctor wanted to see her.

She slipped on another one of the sundresses her mother bought her for the trip, put on her sandals, and headed over to the main building. The pool was full of swimmers and sunbathers, including Gregory Gray and others from yesterday’s sunset cruise—all but Cam. She avoided making eye contact with any of them as she shuffled by, quickly, hoping they wouldn’t notice. She wasn’t in the mood to be around people.

She climbed the stairs to room 200. She lifted her hand to knock, but hesitated when she heard opera music coming from the other side of the door.  In a low vibrato, and in a language that sounded like Latin, Hortense Gray’s voice rang out, and it was not good. Daphne covered her smile with her hand and listened until the music stopped, and then she raised her hand and rapped on the door.

“Enter.”

Daphne gasped before she had even crossed the threshold, because the doctor’s office wasn’t anything like what she had expected. Every square inch of wall space was covered with either book cases overflowing with books or with paintings from many different eras and styles, looking gaudy and crammed together. In the middle of the room were sculptures—three free-standing, life-sized ones and two smaller busts on pedestals. A loom sat in one corner with threads and a half-woven tapestry, and stuffed in another corner was an upright piano, covered in sheet music, some of which had fallen to the floor.

The doctor stood behind her desk wearing a large purple hat and purple velvet suit, which looked ridiculous. She lifted the needle from an old-fashioned record player, plunked on one corner of her messy desk, and removed a record and slipped it into a paper sleeve as she said, “Well, don’t just stand there. Come in and have a seat.”

Daphne had to weave around the many pieces of art to reach the green chenille chair in front to Dr. Gray’s desk, and before she could sit on it, she had to remove a painting.

“Oh, just put that over there on the piano bench. I haven’t decided where I’m going to hang that one. Do you like it? It’s a Pre-Raphaelite imitation. A recent gift from a patient.”

The painting was of a woman in a beautiful dress lying in a stream on her back with flowers all around her. She only had to lay her head back to be completely submerged.

“Is the woman going to drown herself?” Daphne asked as she carefully sat the painting on the piano bench.

“I guess we’ll never know. That’s the thing about paintings. They’re frozen.” After Daphne had taken her seat, the doctor asked, “Do you like my costume?”

Daphne was relieved that it was a costume. She hadn’t been sure how to take the purple hat and suit and white bowtie. “Yes.”

“I’m the mad hatter; can you tell? We’re having a costume party in the ballroom next week, and I’ve been trying to decide how to dress. I think this one suits me.”

“Yes,” Daphne agreed. “It does.”

Hortense Gray removed the purple hat from her head and tossed it on the floor behind her desk. “Well, now.” She sat down and opened a manila folder on the top of a heap of folders. “Thank you for meeting with me. I wanted to discuss a few things with you. First of all, I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about what happened yesterday evening during the cruise. Gregory told me. You must have been terrified.”

Dr. Gray wore a strange smile that made her words seem insincere.

Daphne shrugged and asked, “So why am I here?”

“Interesting question and one we all ask from time to time, don’t you think? But as I like to say, ‘It’s not why but what,’ for life’s meaning isn’t something assigned to us but rather made. Therefore, it’s not why we are here, but what we do with our lives that matters.”

What? “I mean, why did you ask me to your office?”

“Oh, yes, of course.” She removed the bowtie from her neck. “You and I haven’t had much time to chat. I want to make sure you understand a few things about my domain.”

“Your domain?”

Hortense laughed. “That’s my little inside joke. I like to think of myself as Prospero. Are you familiar with Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
?”

Daphne shook her head.

“Well, it’s very good. You should read it. In fact, I have it here somewhere.” Hortense crossed the room to one of her book cases, ran her finger along the spines of several books, and then stopped on one and pulled it into her hands. “You see, I’ve created a place where science, art, and even religion come together in one cause.” She chuckled. “Nietzsche would be impressed. Here. Take it. You can keep it.”

Daphne took the book from Hortense’s outstretched hand. It was a black leather-bound copy and not too thick. She doubted she would have time to read it, but she didn’t want to appear rude. “Thank you.”

Hortense returned to her high-back leather chair behind her desk. “I want you to know there’s very little that happens on this island that I’m not aware of. I know Cameron shared some information with you, and I wanted an opportunity to explain.”

Daphne’s heart rate increased and she sat up in the chair. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

“Of course not. This isn’t a school and he a pupil. Do you see me as a strict principal? How interesting. No, maybe you see this as a prison and I the warden? Cameron’s a volunteer. This is a therapeutic retreat. Relax.”

Daphne sat back in her chair.

“I want you to understand that I come from generations of psychologists. My father was a great psychologist, and his father before him, and so on. Have you heard of the Stanley Milgram Experiment?”

Daphne shook her head.

“What about Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment?”

“No. Sorry.”

Hortense shook her head in disgust. “What do they teach kids in school these days? That’s a shame. Well, my father, Malcolm Gray, was one of a great generation of psychologists back in the sixties and seventies who discovered important insights into human behavior. Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment…”

“Wait, he shocked people?” Daphne asked.

“No. But he made the subjects
think
they were shocking people, and he discovered that the majority of his subjects would continue to obey authority even in the face of begging and pleading on the part of the actor pretending to be shocked.”

“That’s horrible.”

“The behavior, yes, but the experiment was brilliant.” Hortense leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers “You see, this generation of scientists were trying to explain how regular German citizens could have participated in the annihilation of over six million Jews during the Second World War. You are familiar with the holocaust?”

“We learned about it in school.” Plus, Daphne had read several novels on her own, such as
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
and
The Book Thief
and
Number the Stars
. She shuddered. “It doesn’t seem real.”

“Yes, but it was real. And so psychologists wanted to study how such atrocities could be committed by everyday people. Zimbardo was another of my father’s colleagues who created a remarkable experiment by simulating a prison at Stanford University. He assigned some of his subjects with the role of warden and others with that of prisoner. He and my father and their team watched in astonishment as the wardens—regular university students—committed barbaric and atrocious acts against the prisoners—their fellow classmates.”

Daphne shifted nervously in her seat. “That was allowed?”

“Well, Zimbardo made the decision to end the experiment early, against my father’s wishes.” Hortense leaned forward on her messy desk. “It’s unfortunate. We might have learned a great deal more.”

At the expense of the subjects? Daphne wondered. She frowned. “So am I a lab rat?”

Hortense Gray narrowed her eyes. “I’m running an operation here that is guaranteed to make you glad to be alive. Although our resort is less than ten years old, I have been perfecting my techniques for my entire career. My success rate is impeccable. I give hope to family members with depressed and suicidal loved ones when no one else can. Currently, people see me as a last resort because they consider my methods…dubious. But one day, I will be the premier clinical psychologist, like my father was in his day. I’m already quite well-known in my field, though I wasn’t always as successful with my patients as I am today.”

Daphne listened to Hortense, but she was growing bored with all the self-praise, and her eyes couldn’t avoid looking around the strange room at the different pieces of art and at the books packed onto the book cases and stacked on the floors.

“You like my collection?”

“Hmm?” Daphne felt the color rush to her cheeks as she spun around to meet the doctor’s curious gaze. “Yes. It’s quite large.”

“I know. I have a hard time parting with anything, even though I rarely read a book twice or look at a painting more than a few times. They’re so dead, you know? So frozen…so…what’s the word I’m looking for—unsatisfying—after a while, anyway.”

Daphne couldn’t relate to the doctor’s words. She had never had a problem reading a book more than once.

“Life can get that way, Daphne. It can become stale, frozen, dead. We can get stuck, and sometimes it takes something truly profound to bring us back to life.”

“So you scare the crap out of people to wake them up?”

“Not exactly, though terror is definitely an impetus for awakening one’s soul. I prefer to think of my domain as living art, and a place where science and art come together. Here at this resort, you have the rare opportunity of stepping into a painting, or a musical composition, or a book and of bringing it to life as you resurrect your own stale, frozen, dead self.”

Daphne didn’t get what the doctor was trying to say, but she didn’t like all this talk of death and resurrection. Truth be told, Hortense Gray sounded crazy, and Daphne just wanted the hell out. She would stay, though, because it was what her parents wanted.

“And Arturo Gomez knows what you’re doing here at his resort? He’s okay with it?”

Dr. Gray smiled and flapped a hand in Daphne’s direction, like she was swatting a fly. “Arturo Gomez was one of my first patients. He adores me. I saved his life, and now he is my Ariel.”

“Your what?”

“In
The Tempest
, Prospero, frees a spirit from a tree, where the spirit had been imprisoned by a witch for many years. The spirit, Ariel, made Prospero’s domain possible. He gave him the magic Prospero needed to orchestrate his world. So, you see, Arturo, who is wealthy beyond imagination, is my Ariel. I freed him, and he gave me his magic.”

Daphne nodded, thinking,
How nice for you both
, but kept her thoughts to herself.

Then Daphne gasped. As Dr. Gray removed her purple velvet jacket and laid it across one side of the desk, one of her arms, usually covered by long sleeves, was briefly exposed. Daphne caught sight of a number of scars, where long gashes must have once appeared. The doctor noticed and quickly pushed the wrinkled sleeve back down across her arm. Daphne wondered how the doctor got the scars but was too afraid to ask.

Hortense Gray cleared her throat and said, “I know more about you than you might have assumed, Daphne. I have a complete file on you. And there’s something about your case, a piece of the puzzle I don’t think you’ve noticed is missing.”

Daphne felt her neck and back go limp and wobbly, so she grabbed the arms of her chair. She wasn’t prepared to discuss her “case.”

“According to my records, your brother, Joey, exhibited symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia by age sixteen and was diagnosed at age seventeen, but your parents opted not to put him on medication until much later. Is that correct?”

Daphne nodded, her mouth too dry to speak.

“And he was nineteen when he attacked and killed your sister, Kara.”

Daphne waited. What was the doctor’s point?

“Your mother shared with me what she said to you the morning she discovered Kara’s body.”

Daphne stared at the floor as sweat tickled the back of her neck and the inside of her palms. She wanted out.

“She thinks
she’s
the reason you tried to take your life.”

Daphne’s mouth dropped open. She couldn’t believe what the doctor was saying. Her mother blamed herself? “But that’s not true.”

“She made you feel like it was your fault.”

“It was. You don’t know the whole story.” Daphne’s heart pounded.

“But if your parents had gotten proper treatment for your brother…”

“Stop! It wasn’t their fault!” Daphne stood from the chair. Why was the doctor saying such things? Was this part of her crazy therapy? Time to lie and blame others?