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“Will you come back?” she said.

“You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

“You need this,” she said.

“I’ll let you know.”

For a moment it seemed as though she wanted to say something else. The thought seemed to flit about her face like a scrap of paper caught on a wind current. In the end, she chose not to say it, whatever it was, and I was left to wonder what it could have been.

And realized that’s probably how she gets her patients to return.

Chapter 18

Sensory Resources had a Gulfstream in a hangar in Trenton that needed to get back to LA, so Callie and I caught it as far west as Vegas. With a ride like that, you grab while you can. In a perfect world it would have been a round-tripper, but hey, I couldn’t complain. I’d just have to charter something on my own dime to get us back home Thursday. I’d keep it Thursday night and use it to fly Kathleen and me to Charlie’s funeral on Friday.

In a G4, Trenton to Vegas runs about four hours. A lot of time to chat, but we were quiet most of the trip. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Dr. Crouch had said about the psychological pain. Until I got a handle on its cause, I’d be susceptible to severe chest pains at the worst possible times. That type of physical disability could prove deadly in my line of work.

“Cirque du Soleil,” I said.

Callie looked up at me. “What about it?”

“I didn’t know you were such a big fan of performance art.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said.

True, I thought. And a lot I did know.

This is how you get to be Callie: you’re eight years old, you watch TV, you play in the yard, you go to school, and you’ve got the brightest smile and bubbliest laugh in town. Except that one day you’re playing outside at your friend’s house and the sky has gotten dark and you decide if you run you can beat the rain, because it’s only a couple of blocks.

So you start running and you get about half-way home before the rain comes hard and you do something that changes your life.

You hesitate.

You stop running and wonder what to do. Should you keep heading home, or go back to your friend’s house and call your mom to pick you up.

At that precise moment of indecision, you’re tackled, punched, and dragged into the bushes.

The man is large and powerfully built. He smells of garlic and moldy cheese. He’s got you face down in the mud and he doesn’t have to hit you in the back of the head, but he does, and he hits you again and again. And each time he hits you, you start to black out, and you wish you could scream, but when you try, nothing comes out but a hiss.

The smelly man pulls your panties down to your ankles and hits you again. He starts touching you in a certain way—you know the word: inappropriately. At first you don’t worry so much because what you wanted more than anything was for him to stop punching the back of your head. But then, when he starts talking to you with a love voice, and calls you his sexy little girl you want to vomit. When his words turn really dirty and he starts calling you names, you start wishing he’d stop saying those things and go back to hitting you.

Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it gets much worse. The pain is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced, or ever imagined. It numbs you and your mind can’t tolerate it, so it just shuts down.

The man leaves you lying there to die, face down in a muddy field. You nearly drown in the muck but someone finds you and brings you home and for the next six months you’re in and out of hospitals and you can’t speak, can’t feel, can’t think. You sit in a chair facing a window and everyone thinks you’re looking out the window, but you’re actually staring at the window, and your mind is trying to work out the way the wooden pieces intersect, the slats that hold the window panes. Something about how they intersect. If you can figure that out, well, it’s not much, but it’s something to hold on to; a place from which to reclaim your sanity.

And then one day it’s fall and the wind is blowing the leaves off the trees and one errant leaf snags on the window pane next to the wooden slats and when it does, you focus on the leaf. For the first time in months, you see there’s something on the other side of the window, and if there’s something beyond that window, then maybe it’s something big enough to live for.

You begin the process of building your life from scratch. But you’re not building the life you were meant to live, you’re building something else altogether.