Zoe Letting Go (25 page)

“Oh?” I called over my shoulder from the foot of the stairs. “I appreciate the diagnosis.”

“That’s Alexandra’s inbox,” Caroline blurted, speeding up to match my pace. “It’s not a mailbox. We’re not even
allowed
to send letters.
You’re
the one who can’t be trusted!
You’re
the one with issues—”

She stopped, clamping her mouth shut as Alexandra strode into the room.

“What’s going on?”

A set of keys clanged in Alexandra’s hand as she swept toward us from the direction of the front door. She must have overheard the argument when she let herself in.

“Caroline, go to breakfast immediately.”

I smirked at Caroline, who looked as though she’d been hit over the head with a bag of hammers.

“
Go
,” Alexandra said. “Zoe, my office. Now.”

Good
, I thought. Not only would I get to skip breakfast, but I had a few questions for Alexandra myself—specifically, about whether Caroline had been telling the truth about the letters. Was I
really
the only one allowed to send mail from Twin Birch? Why on earth would I get special treatment?

As I followed the therapist into her all-white office, a section from the Twin Birch memo came back to me with startling clarity.

Patients arrive over the course of five days, with arrivals staggered so that each patient can receive a customized initiation.

A customized initiation, I thought, meant that the administrators could control exactly how much information was doled out to each one of us. Naturally, each patient would assume she’d been given the same spiel as the next patient. There’d be no reason to think otherwise.

Alexandra sat down, fuming, but I remained on my feet. A number of queer thoughts were occurring to me at once. For starters, what would it mean if I
was
the only girl allowed to send letters from Twin Birch?

Sensing my inattention to her efforts, Alexandra stood up and zeroed in on where I stood. Before I could protest, she’d taken my elbow and guided me to a sitting position on the couch, and the gesture surprised me so much that I realized what her goal was only
after
she’d accomplished it. With a quick series of movements, she’d manipulated the situation so that she no longer appeared to be my enemy, instead taking on the physical position of an ally.

No,
I thought.
This woman is not your friend, Zoe
.

“Why am I the only one allowed to send letters?” I asked, not bothering to hide the accusation in my tone.

Alexandra looked at me sympathetically but didn’t answer right away.

“You are sending them, aren’t you?” I continued. “They’re getting to Elise, right?”

“Zoe—”

“Tell me that’s a mailbox. Tell me Caroline is wrong!”

“Zoe, please calm down.”

A sickening realization dawned on me. “That,” I said, pointing a shaking finger at the red box outside the door, “is not a mailbox.”

“No, it’s not,” Alexandra said.

I sprang up from the sofa and began to pace. Alexandra had suddenly become, in my eyes, a person who had unilaterally deceived me for the past five weeks. I didn’t trust her, her choreography, or her insipid white leather sofas. I wanted urgently to slash the leather surface to ribbons—to shred the afghans and overturn the chairs. Then I stopped pacing. If possible, the situation was worse than I’d originally suspected.

“Elise hasn’t been responding to my letters,” I said, my voice spiked with accusation. “I thought it was my fault. But it’s not.”

Alexandra leveled her gaze at me.

“It’s
yours
,” I went on. “She hasn’t been responding because you haven’t been sending them,” I said. As soon as the words were out, I knew that I was right.

Alexandra watched me. “It’s true,” she said. “I have not been sending your letters.”

“That’s why she’s been ignoring me!”
I yelled. I didn’t care if the girls upstairs could hear me. I’d scream loud enough to bring down the house if I wanted.

Alexandra stared back at me serenely, and the sight of her indifference provoked me to further heights of apoplexy. I punched the box of Kleenex on the coffee table, sending it to the ground with a bounce.

“How can you not have sent my letters?” I screamed.

No answer. I slapped the glass surface of the table with every ounce of strength, causing it to rattle menacingly.

“
That’s
why she hasn’t written me back.” Little black stars were scattering across my vision. “Not me. It has nothing to do with me. I hate this place. I hate it!”

“No, Zoe, that’s not why,” Alexandra soothed, her well-moisturized hands folded over one knee.

“Did you read them?” I pummeled my fists against the couch. “You read my letters. How
dare
you read my letters?”

“I did not read your letters.”

This was not happening. It could not be happening. I needed to sit down badly, but I would rather die than touch the wretched sofa again—the sofa where I’d sat, like an idiot, lapping up hours of Alexandra’s false empathy.

I melted to the floor, clutching my shoulders. Tears boiled forth. I rocked, trying to force air into my cramped lungs. Then I heard her voice again.

“You know why Elise hasn’t responded,” Alexandra said from a closer distance this time.

She came to kneel at my side.

“You didn’t send them,” I sobbed, rocking. “You didn’t send them.”

“Elise is dead, Zoe.”

“
You didn’t send my letters
.”

“It’s time for you to confront it.”

“
You never sent my letters.”

“Elise is dead.”

“
You—
”

“Zoe.”

I was going under, I could feel it. There I went.

“Zoe.”

I sat very still, like a spoon suspended in Jell-O. Not thinking, just floating.

Alexandra stood above me, her face shimmering through the Jell-O distortion. There was no reason for me to break the surface.

I didn’t need to breathe.

Elise always said
that there are two types of people in the world: people who lose things and people who break things. She was the kind of person who lost things—subway passes, pots of lip balm, glasses of water, English papers. I am the other kind of person.

Forty-eight hours ago, I finally learned why I’d been sent to this place.

I spent the remainder of that day in bed, watching shadows change shape against the wall. My door remained closed except for visits from Alexandra, who brought food at intervals but didn’t make me eat it. All day I hovered in some strange place between consciousness and unconsciousness, though I must have truly fallen asleep at some point because I woke up today to find that it was morning. The light that entered the bedroom had not woken me up. It was too pale and weak, and Devon hadn’t woken
me up, either. Nobody else was awake, and I figured it had to be around six a.m. Sitting up, I immediately understood what had roused me. The pain originated in a hidden space behind my ear, the left one, and spidered out across my skull, pulsing coolly as it grasped.
No, no,
I said aloud, mainly to register that I wasn’t dreaming. There was no roommate to worry about waking with my moans; Caroline had been transferred to Jane’s room as soon as our confrontation was brought to Angela’s attention. I stood up experimentally. But this worsened the headache, so I got back in bed and waited. The room was silent. There was a knock on the door.

Then it opened. None of the doors at Twin Birch can be locked.

Alexandra knelt down beside the bed and put a hand on my arm.

When I didn’t verbally or physically respond, she stood, looked around for a seat, and settled on Caroline’s vacant bed. I followed the trajectory of a dust mote as it drifted to the bedspread in front of me.

“I think it would be a good idea to start talking again,” she said. Technically we’d skipped the previous day’s session, though Alexandra had been in and out of my room every hour. A session would have been pointless. I could barely breathe, much less talk.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Eleven thirty, give or take.”

Later than I thought. Had I fallen asleep since waking up this morning? The rest of the girls were outside, gardening, hence
the absolute quiet of the house. My headache was better, and I hoisted myself up to a sitting position.

“On April 22 of this year,” Alexandra began, “you experienced an extraordinarily tragic event.”

I found another dust mote to watch.

“Your best friend passed away.”

The mote fell.

“Zoe? Stay with me.”

Then she repeated what she had already said, and although I’d heard the words before, they still struck me as gibberish. As pure nonsense. It was like bending down to tie your shoes and finding gloves on your feet.

“What you’ve been experiencing,” Alexandra said, “are symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, Zoe. Numbness. Detachment. A lack of interest in daily activities.”

I wrapped my arms around my chest, pretending that they were stitches holding my body together.

“You’ve experienced significant memory loss,” Alexandra continued. “You’ve told me many things about your life during our sessions, but your stories abruptly drop off after a certain date. We’ve talked about nothing that has happened since April 8 of this year.”

“April 8?” I echoed. The date had no significance to me.

“The final snowstorm of the season.”

“Oh,” I said, my voice microscopic.

“According to her parents, that was the last time you saw Elise.”

“I can barely survive a week without her,” I said, straining to
keep my voice from growing agitated. “But two months? Three months? That—”

“Zoe.”

Alexandra leaned over and picked a manila envelope up from my bedside table. I hadn’t noticed it before—had it been there when she entered?

“You haven’t opened it,” she observed quietly, gazing down at the packet.
ZOE
was written in plain letters at the top. Returning to her seat on Caroline’s bed, she slit open the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of white envelopes, then placed the whole bundle in front of me. I picked up the first and flipped it over.
Elise Pope
was centered neatly on the envelope in my handwriting, followed by her address in Brooklyn. I flipped over the next envelope and saw the same thing. I did not need to see them all to know that they were sealed. Elise hadn’t read a word. But still, Alexandra was wrong—her evidence was misleading. Elise hadn’t read my letters because Alexandra hadn’t sent them, not because she was—

“Hold on,” I said. I had a way to prove Alexandra wrong.

I leaned over the bed and felt around underneath for my notebook, which I opened to an earlier page. All I had to do was find my entries from April 8 onward and show them to Alexandra to prove that my memory was intact. How, after all, could I have simply deleted two months of time from my consciousness? Nobody can do that, even if they want to. Amnesia is not a condition that can be attained voluntarily. I paged urgently through the journal as Alexandra waited.

Then I stopped.

There was nothing. I reversed the pages and tried again, going backwards through June.

Nothing.

My entries from winter converged directly with my entries from June, when I had my first day at Twin Birch. Between the two periods, there was no evidence of time elapsing.

“Memory loss can happen,” Alexandra said, “after traumatic events. Perhaps it would help if we reconstruct the timeline of what happened. The memories will start to come back to you, Zoe.”

I was caught between two versions of reality and unsure of which to believe.

“If we re-create the timeline,” Alexandra continued, “you’ll be able to see the past more clearly. And you’ll be able to come to terms with it.”

“Okay,” I said softly.

Instead of starting at the beginning, we needed to start at the end.

“Elise died on April 22,” Alexandra said.

“Elise died,” I echoed, wishing I could erase the words as soon as they were out. How could I tell such a lie? Why was she making me do it?

“Do you remember when she left school?” Alexandra prodded.

I did not remember.

“April 11 was her last day. A Monday. She was hospitalized the following Friday.”

I did not believe these things, but without a record in my
journal, I could not prove them wrong. There was no evidence. Nobody believes anything without evidence.

“If this all happened,” I said, my voice thread-thin, “how come I don’t know?”

“You
do
know. Try to remember.”

I squinted, as if trying to bring my thoughts into focus. The memories were elusive and shape-shifting; just when I thought that I’d grabbed hold of one, it ducked my grasp. But something small was coming back to me.

“I remember being alone,” I said.

“At school?”

“Yes.” The affirmation left a black taste in my mouth, as though I’d bitten into rubber. “It happened so quickly,” I said. “She was fine one day, and the next day she was not.”

She was always cold. Even when the snow melted and the spring bulbs flowered, she wore a winter coat. Her hands were yellow from lack of circulation.

“Her parents took her out of class,” I continued.

There were always hairs on her coat. Her hair was falling out. Strands drifted downward at the slightest movement of her head. Disembodied tangles appeared on her pillow every morning, and sometimes on the collar of her coat.

“She was so thin,” I said. “I couldn’t see her anymore.”

“Why not?”

I squeezed my eyes shut, casting into the void of my mind for an answer. When it came to me, I bent my head down and mumbled the words into my blanket.

“Can you repeat that, Zoe?”

No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak it out loud.

“You’re doing so well,” Alexandra intoned.

I lifted my head above the blanket. “I wasn’t allowed to see her.”

“Why not?”

I knew why.

“It was my fault.”